Technical Field
This disclosure relates to methods and systems supporting online advertising and online transactions by a user. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to category-based contextual advertisement generation and management.
Related Art
An increasingly popular way of delivering Internet advertisements is to tie the presentation of advertisements to particular user behaviors and/or user profiles, and/or user demographics. Such user behaviors include user access to a particular web page, user selection (also called mouse-clicking or clicking) of a particular location on a web page, user entry of a particular search string or keyword, and the like. In order to target advertising accurately, advertisers or vendors pay to have their advertisements presented in response to certain kinds of events—that is, their advertisements are presented when particular user behaviors warrant such presentation. If a particular advertisement (ad) leads to some user action, an advertiser may receive remuneration for the ad.
Using other systems and processes on the Web, users can search for goods and services via the Internet and shop or make purchases of goods or services over the Internet. Unfortunately, conventional systems have not been able to create an effective way of using on-line product/service category definitions to create and enable bidding on contextual advertisements that may lead to a user purchase transaction.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,061 discloses methods and apparatuses for targeting the delivery of advertisements over a network such as the Internet. Statistics are compiled on individual users and networks and the use of the advertisements is tracked to permit targeting of the advertisements of individual users. In response to requests from affiliated sites, an advertising server transmits to people accessing the page of a site an appropriate one of the advertisements based upon profiling of users and networks. However, the '061 patent does not describe or suggest using on-line product/service category definitions to create and enable bidding on contextual advertisements.
Thus, a system and method for category-based contextual advertisement generation and management is needed.